I think you're the one who didn't understand me. You made a correction about the meaning of the phrase "throwing an exception". The point of my question is that your correction is incorrect, because if you read the sentence "if the argument is negative, foo() throws an exception" you would indeed understand that an exception will unwind the stack out of the foo() call in such a situation. There's no difference between "foo() allows an exception to bubble up" and "foo() throws an exception"; both phrases describe the same situation.